Primary research areas:
- Phonetics (coarticulation, speech perception, relation between perception and production)
- Laboratory Phonology (especially phonetic underpinnings of sound change)
I am broadly interested in the relation between the cognitive representation and physical instantiation of speech. Many of my investigations study this relation from the perspective of overlapping or coarticulated speech gestures. For example, in ongoing work on the perceptual and articulatory time course of coarticulation, my collaborators and I are exploring possible links between a listener’s dynamic use of coarticulatory information as the acoustic signal unfolds in real time and that language user’s own coarticulated productions. This work is driven by an interest in integrative theoretical approaches to perception and production, and in theories of sound change that explain how contextually conditioned variants in the ambient language become new perception and production norms.